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Travis D'Ambrosia's second Interview
ABOARD THE MAURO ALTIERI, THREE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE VAALAJARVI, FINLAND stand next to General D’Ambrosia in the CIC, the Combat Information Center, of Europe’s answer to the massive U.S. D-29 command and control dirigible. The crew work silently at their glowing monitors. Occasionally, one of them speaks into a headset, a quick, whispered acknowledgment in French, German, Spanish, or Italian. The general leans over the video chart table, watching the entire operation from the closest thing to a God’s-eye view. “Attack”—when I first heard that word, my gut reaction was “oh shit.” Does that surprise you? I can answer… Sure it does. You probably expected “the brass” to be just champing at the bit, all that blood and guts, “hold ’em by the nose while we kick ’em in the ass” crap. his head. I don’t know who created the stereotype of the hard-charging, dim-witted, high school football coach of a general officer. Maybe it was Hollywood, or the civilian press, or maybe we did it to ourselves by allowing those insipid, egocentric clowns—the MacArthurs and Halseys and Curtis E. LeMays—to define our image to the rest of the country. Point is, that’s the image of those in uniform, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. I was scared to death of taking our armed forces on the offensive, more so because it wouldn’t be my ass hanging out in the fire. I’d only be sending others out to die, and here’s what I’d be sending them up against. turns to another screen on the far wall, nodding to an operator, and the image dissolves into a wartime map of the continental United States. Two hundred million zombies 1 . Who can even visualize that type of number, let alone combat it? At least this time around we knew what we were combating, but when you added up all the experience, all the data we’d compiled on their origin, their physiology, their strengths, their weaknesses, their motives, and their mentality, it still presented us with a very gloomy prospect for victory. The book of war, the one we’ve been writing since one ape slapped another, was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch. All armies, be they mechanized or mountain guerilla, have to abide by three basic restrictions: they have to be bred, fed, and led. Bred: you need warm bodies, or else you don’t have an army; fed: once you’ve got that army, they’ve got to be supplied; and led: no matter how decentralized that fighting force is, there has to be someone among them with the authority to say “follow me.” Bred, fed, and led; and none of these restrictions applied to the living dead. Did you ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Remarque paints a vivid picture of Germany becoming “empty,” meaning that toward the end of the war, they were simply running out of soldiers. You can fudge the numbers, send the old men and little boys, but eventually you’re going to hit the ceiling…unless every time you killed an enemy, he came back to life on your side. That’s how Zack operated, swelling his ranks by thinning ours! And it only worked one way. Infect a human, he becomes a zombie. Kill a zombie, he becomes a corpse. We could only get weaker, while they might actually get stronger. All human armies need supplies, this army didn’t. No food, no ammo, no fuel, not even water to drink or air to breathe! There were no logistics lines to sever, no depots to destroy. You couldn’t just surround and starve them out, or let them “wither on the vine.” Lock a hundred of them in a room and three years later they’ll come out just as deadly. It’s ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain, because, as a group, they have no collective brain to speak of. There was no leadership, no chain of command, no communication or cooperation on any level. There was no president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to surgically strike. Each zombie is its own, self-contained, automated unit, and this last advantage is what truly encapsulates the entire conflict. You’ve heard the expression “total war”; it’s pretty common throughout human history. Every generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about how his people have declared “total war” against an enemy, meaning that every man, woman, and child within his nation was committing every second of their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels. First of all, no country or group is ever 100 percent committed to war; it’s just not physically possible. You can have a high percentage, so many people working so hard for so long, but all of the people, all of the time? What about the malingerers, or the conscientious objectors? What about the sick, the injured, the very old, the very young? What about when you’re sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump? Is that a “dump for victory”? That’s the first reason total war is impossible for humans. The second is that all nations have their limits. There might be individuals within that group who are willing to sacrifice their lives; it might even be a relatively high number for the population, but that population as a whole will eventually reach its maximum emotional and physiological breaking point. The Japanese reached theirs with a couple of American atomic bombs. The Vietnamese might have reached theirs if we’d dropped a couple more, 2 but, thank all holy Christ, our will broke before it came to that. That is the nature of human warfare, two sides trying to push the other past its limit of endurance, and no matter how much we like to talk about total war, that limit is always there…unless you’re the living dead. For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on Earth. That’s the kind of enemy that was waiting for us beyond the Rockies. That’s the kind of war we had to fight. Category:Interviews